Reply by lumberjoe

Sawkerf, I don’t want to start a browser war either, but trust me, IE is terrible. Not only terrible, but can be dangerous to use. A lot of what I do for a living is internet security. My company doesn’t even allow use of IE expept to browse Microsoft sepcific, internal, sites (Sharepoint). IE has more security holes than any other product. Also because it is the most widely used (default) browser, it is also the most commonly targeted for exploits.

It’s not so much a usability/feature issue. Using IE can be a security risk if you are not vigilant about updates (there are so many of them, we in the industry call the first Tuesday of every month “Patch Tuesday”).

Another issue, and the one your are having here, is framework comparability. IE’s standards are awful and make web designers want to jump out of buildings. Since you can get any browser you want for free, web designers will standardize to webkit (Chrome, apple’s safari, and Opera I believe) and Mozilla’s Geko engine (Firefox). No one wants to create an entirely new framework for IE users – although a lot of websites do. When your browser requests information from a page, it tells the page what browser it is. This is also how less honest websites can exploit your unpatched security holes.

I hope you didn’t take this as a “Stop using IE because it’s not the cool thing to do!!” post. As a professional, and in my professional opinion, you should not use Internet Explorer